English self-forms and comparable phrases from different Germanic languages (e. g. Dutch zelf, Swedish själv, and so on. ) are utilized in various features: as ‘intensifiers’ (e. g. The president himself made the choice) and as markers of reflexivity (John criticized himself). at the foundation of a comparative syntactic and semantic research, this publication addresses the query of why such it sounds as if diversified capabilities might be expressed via an identical observe.

The linguistic afﬁnity between Lauren and Mr Tuttle may be read as a further piece of evidence of his unreal nature. If we choose the interpretive option that Mr Tuttle does not actually exist, or that he resides in a spectral or hallucinatory sphere, his ostensible polyphony gets embodied in Lauren herself. She, in other words, not only hears voices but produces them herself. She articulates her own voice, Mr Tuttle’s voice, his imitation of her and her husband’s voices, and her own adoption of Mr Tuttle’s idiolect.

Lauren thinks she understands how difﬁcult it is for him to convey, verbally or paralinguistically, the “things” he has in mind (46). As if another kind of communication were being channeled at the séance, sudden rapping and knocking begin to be heard. Although the source of these sounds is not paranormal but simply rain, this natural phenomenon is described in emphatically auditory terms and as if there were an intelligence suspectable behind the noises. The natural is narrationally supernaturalized: “The rain hit the windows in taps and spatters” (46).

But it adds to this genre two related and interconnected features: ﬁrstly, a great interest in the surface and the superﬁcial and secondly, a doubling of the narrative voice. The ﬁrst of these features is surely common to many contemporary works of extreme ﬁction and the last to a few, including Ellis’s own novel American Psycho with its shift into third-person narration towards the end. In Glamorama, these features operate at the thematic level, with important implications for the way in which the story is told and read.